Literature Studies

his issue is another selection of profiles from our tentatively named Guide to Irish Writers of Gothic, Supernatural and Fantastic Literature. The keen-eyed will spot one name that might seem out of place: Harry Clarke (1889-1931). Clarke, of course, was not a writer, but an artist who worked in watercolour, pen and ink, and stained glass. As an illustrator, Clarke put his indelible mark on literature of the macabre and fantastic. His best-known illustrations are those accompanying Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1919/23), though his illustrations for Andersen, Perrault, and Swinburne also bear hallmarks of the strange. So too do goblins and grotesques leer from the corners of his stained glass work. Writing in The Irish Statesman on Clarke’s illustrations for Goethe’s Faust, the poet A.E. was clearly taken with the artist’s power.

Argues that modern Irish history encompasses a deep-seated fear of betrayal, and that this fear has been especially prevalent throughout Irish society since the revolutionary period at the outset of the twentieth century. -- .

A collection of essays on feminism, from one of the most important and original public intellectuals writing today

Undertones is a ground-breaking reference book on jazz in crime fiction. As the opening historical overview shows, crime and jazz are soulmates in popular (especially American) culture and this book is by far the most exhaustive - but also entertaining survey of the interaction of both. T

Focussing on the work of Hannah Arendt, the author traces the emergence of a critical aesthetics of judgment in a group of writers - often hard to place in the 'between' of modernism and contemporary writing - including Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch and Martha Gellhorn.